I’m a new media journalist. I’m not entirely sure what this means some days, because it’s constantly in flux, but that’s part of what makes it fascinating and rewarding.
Earlier this year Vadim Lavrusik (@lavrusik) and Sree Sreenivasan (@sreenet) did a public talk sponsored by Mashable entitled “The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations.” I’ve been working to adapt what I already know about both journalism and technology into the mold formed from the impression their slides and text left in my mind to make myself the best “future journalist” I can be.
Sometime in the late 1980s I discovered my father’s old typewriter gathering dust in the basement. I lugged the rather large “portable” Smith-Corona to my room and started typing. I didn’t come up with a whole lot back then, but I loved seeing things take shape on a page after flowing out of my head. Combine that with a love of reading, and a love of writing was born.
Subject to terminal writer’s block and a perpetual vagabond (I have always had a home, but I’ve never been productive in it), I found myself scratching notes on napkins and so on. I think it was around 1999 that my parents bought me a used IBM laptop for my birthday, hoping to foster something creative as I was stuck in a desperate place between something I thought could be a career (but wasn’t) and the rest of the great wide world ahead of me. I’d been creating web pages since early 1996 and started writing things to put on them shortly thereafter.
“If it’s rusting, rotting or falling down, I’ll probably take a picture of it.”
In 2003, after a few years of blogging privately and working in the dead-end sector, I decided to go back to school. In 2004 I started studying journalism at Metro State. In 2005 I put my years as a web hobbyist to good use and started doing contract work for DenverPost.com at night. I’m still there today, trying to make our work look better online and help build our online rapport with our readers.
In 2008 I changed my major to technical communication — having already completed everything I needed for a journalism degree except the foreign language, I made the change not only to escape more years of Spanish classes (I took Spanish every year from 6th grade through 11th) but also because I felt the wind blowing stronger than ever in the digital direction.
Things keep going faster and faster, and these days find me trying to learn everything I can about engagement in social media, online community development, evolving web technology and trends, and most of all journalism, as it tries desperately to bend and twist into the canyons the river of technology cuts into the landscape of the news ecology and survive to inform another day.
Education
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